The Endless Pursuit of Students

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Bill Royall passed away late last month in Richmond, Virginia. He was 74.

In higher-education admissions circles, Royall was a legend—equally admired and criticized (sometimes by the same people) for his tactics in marketing colleges and universities over the last four decades. He was head of Royall & Company, a firm known for leading the assault on the mailboxes of American teenagers. If you’ve ever been inundated with mail (and e-mail) from colleges, you have Bill Royall to thank.

The backstory: Royall was a political marketing consultant in the late 1980s when he was approached by the admissions director at Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia. The all-men’s college would become Royall’s first higher-education client.

• Royall was stunned by how higher education recruited students when he first started working for Hampden-Sydney. Colleges bought too few names of prospective students, in Royall’s opinion, and waited for high schoolers to contact them instead of flooding them with mail to gin up interest.
• The campus brochure existed long before Royall entered the scene, but what he perfected was making the colorful college “viewbook” as commonplace in the mailboxes of American teenage homes as an L.L.Bean catalog.

Last year, I met Royall while researching my forthcoming book, Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions. I spent time with him in Richmond to learn more about the evolution of direct marketing in higher ed.

• Until the early 1980s, schools that actively marketed to students were seen as “hucksters,” in the words of former Penn admissions dean, Lee Stetson.
• But the last of the Baby Boomers were leaving colleges then, and to survive many colleges had to go out and find students to fill classrooms and dorms.

Colleges were helped in their quest to find students by a service the College Board had started in the early 1970s called Student Search, which sold the names and addresses of test takers—in other words, prospective students—to admissions offices.

While visiting Royall, he told me a story that, at first, seemed too good of a tale to be true. I spent weeks interviewing several people, including former Royall employees, to confirm the details.

• Before the rise of the Internet, the College Board released its name buys to colleges and consultants only a few times a year on 9-inch reels sent by FedEx.
• So, to beat the competition, Royall came up with a plan to bypass the FedEx delivery.

Here’s the rest of the account from Chapter 1 of the book:

One summer afternoon in 1997, he sent a twin-engine Beechcraft Baron to New Jersey to intercept the tape delivery from a FedEx processing center near Newark airport. Two men—one the Beechcraft’s pilot and the other a Royall executive—loaded 150 boxes into the back of their aircraft, the seats removed to make enough room. As the sun set, the prop-plane was cleared for takeoff on its return to Richmond.

When it landed, Bill Royall met the aircraft and its precious cargo on the tarmac. The men transferred the boxes into a waiting truck and the group sped off on the thirty-minute drive to Royall’s headquarters. Despite the late hour, the office was full. Workers opened each box revealing the stacks of tapes, each with a slice of student names purchased by a specific client...

Workers fed the reels into a machine that spit out letters addressed to each of the students by their first name. The letters included other personal details—their intended major, interests in school—and the all-important tear-off reply card.

A few weeks later, Bill Royall’s phone started to ring steadily with calls from clients, letting him know his strategy had succeeded—mountains of reply cards were arriving on their campuses every day…

From now on, Royall told his team, he wanted his schools to be first in the mailboxes of students—before they had a chance to fall in love with another college.

The current context: Search is bigger than ever for the College Board. It sells names to nearly 2,000 colleges and scholarship organizations, up from 1,600 a decade ago.

• A student’s name is sold, on average, 18 times over her high school career, and some names have been purchased more than 70 times—all at a cost now of 45 cents a name, each time it’s requested among those test takers who opt in.

Why this matters now: The coronavirus prevented more than a million first-time SAT takers in the high-school class of 2021 from taking the test this spring and summer. The canceled ACT/SAT doesn’t only leave rising seniors lacking a score; it also results in the loss of names for colleges to fill the top of their recruitment funnel. Without those names, colleges will have to think differently about how to find prospective applicants in the coming year.

One last note on Royall: In December 2014, the Advisory Board Company bought Royall & Company for $850 million.

When I visited Royall, he was more than gracious with his time. We went through his archives. We talked at length about the history of enrollment marketing. Rest in Peace, Bill.

Read more: A sample from Chapter 1, exclusive for subscribers of this newsletter.

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